Urban to Rural Migration in Eastern Europe: Unpacking digital ruralities through TikTok video analysis

2026-05-01

AI Summary

This study examines the underexplored phenomenon of rural–urban migration in Eastern Europe, focusing on its representation and implications within digital media. Drawing on 901 TikTok videos documenting Romanian rural–urban mobility and grounded in theories of digital rurality, the research innovatively applies Harvey and Soja’s spatial triad to the Eastern European digital rural context. Employing a mixed-methods approach—combining quantitative content analysis with digital ethnography—the analysis interrogates representations across three dimensions: locality, representational forms, and everyday life. Findings reveal that social media not only reconfigures rural identities and public discourse but also engenders new forms of digital labor and self-commodification. The digitally mediated rural is rendered highly datafied and often idealized, serving multiple functions including tourism promotion, health communication, and expressions of political and religious sentiment.

Abstract

Urban to rural migration is a less-researched phenomenon compared to its counterpart: rural to urban migration. In parts of Europe, an increasing number of people living in big urban centers within the country, or moving from other countries decide to relocate to rural areas. In this paper, we examine this phenomenon by analysing content posted on TikTok that documents this transition. We collected a corpus of 901 videos posted until late 2025, documenting urban to rural migration in Romania, under three hashtags, which have collectively been played a total of 24 million times at the time when we gathered the dataset. We analyse this corpus both quantitatively and qualitatively and discuss our findings through the lens of digital rurality - a theory based on Harvey's and Soja's spatial triad, applied to rural spaces, and based on the role of digital technologies as (re-)mediators of everyday lived experience. Specifically, we analyze the corpus as: (a) digital rural localities, (b) formal representations of the digital rural, and (c) everyday lives of the digital rural. We find that (a) Social media platforms enable new forms of paid labor that sometimes involve the commodification of the self in rural areas, although many of the creators we analyze do not explicitly acknowledge this with their audiences. (b) The digital rural gains new forms of representation, and rural areas in remote Romania are highly data-rich across TikTok. (c) The everyday lives represented through the digital rural are sometimes idealized or romanticised. However, they serve as promoters for tourism and are used as sites to document and discuss a variety of topics including giving ample health advice, typically by non-specialists and sometimes criticizing Western medicine, expressing and promoting religious and political views but also acting as forms of general self-expression.

Problem

• urban to rural migration
• digital ruralities
• TikTok
• rural representation
• digital media

Innovation

• digital rurality
• TikTok video analysis
• urban-to-rural migration
• spatial triad
• social media ethnography